This cabinet card of my great-great-great-grandmother Ann Rose in the 1850s is the oldest photo in my collection. Several photos of Ann show her reading - perhaps a love of books and reading is in my DNA?

Here is the information I gathered on Ann’s life story:

Ann was born on August 6, 1828 to Lachlan and Ann Rose in Kingussie and Insh, Inverness-shire, Scotland. She married William Collie in 1852, and together they had 11 children. The family immigrated to Canada in the late 1870s. She lived in Woodlands Manitoba in 1891, and moved to MacDonald, Manitoba in the early 1900s. Ann passed away in 1917 in Winnipeg, Manitoba when she was 88 years old.